


Wilder'd on His Darksome Way

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [8]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Caretaking, Dreams and Nightmares, Ettersburg, Gun Violence, M/M, PTSD, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 07:04:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12127113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Abdul Walid learned everything he knew about PTSD – which was quite a lot – from taking care of Thomas Nightingale (who still insisted on saying ‘shell shock’ or ‘combat stress fatigue’ instead, but that was a battle for another day). Still, he had to admit that being sucked into a dream full of snow and blood and possibly-werewolves was a step right into the unknown.





	Wilder'd on His Darksome Way

**Author's Note:**

> This work is semi-standalone, assuming Walid and Nightingale are in a long-term relationship; but for full background and minor details, it definitely helps to read the first part of the Gentleman's Agreement AU!

*

Thomas Nightingale was one of the first, and for a long time the only, soldier or former soldier Abdul Walid had ever come to know. He didn’t consider that to be all that strange, when he looked back on it – despite the hysteria of the Falklands War and the disputes NATO got itself into all over the world, Britain was a nation essentially at peace after the Forties, and Abdul had gotten blissfully through his education and upbringing without having to consider overmuch the effects that conflict might have on anyone. He read about combat fatigue in his textbooks for general exams in medical school, promptly forgot about it in his quest to cram more information into his head about villi, the history of electrogastrography, and Kupffer cells, and took a passing interest in the work of a psychology student he knew in his last year in Edinburgh only because they seemed to have a passing mutual interest in sleeping with each other.

That relationship having failed, Abdul arrived in London not knowing or caring much for the inner life of the mind when there was so much about the external body to be learned; but when he met Thomas, he flattered himself that he came around to the idea of psychological care with gusto.

He learned about nightmares, on long nights when they fell asleep over their books and Abdul woke in the library of the Folly, uncertain what had roused him, to see Nightingale standing stiffly from his chair, unsteady, reeling, looking for light and air. One of the things that made him feel most loved, when they were finally sharing a bed, was that Thomas would reach for Abdul in the dark, curling into him, letting his unsteady breath be soothed back into sleep by the touch of Abdul’s hands. It didn’t happen often in those six months that he stayed in the Folly – in retrospect he realized, somewhat bewildered and certainly proud, that perhaps his mere presence had kept the nightmares at bay for a little longer.

He never liked to ask Thomas too many direct questions. He had done his reading, and after wading through the reams of shite written about shell shock and cowardice and moral failing and ‘combat fatigue,’ he had come to the conclusion that most of the medical world didn’t give a damn about provoking crises in their most vulnerable patients. The Americans, after Vietnam, were getting better at it by necessity, but nothing they published convinced Abdul that it would prove helpful to Thomas.

He could be a touchstone, though, he decided. He could do his best to be a home and a warm hearth, and lay himself open to whatever it was the darkest corners of Thomas’s mind, of his life, of the cramped and hidden rooms of the Folly, could throw at him. And for many years, it seemed to work.

He was almost ashamed, in retrospect, to have not considered beforehand the mental repercussions that could occur if Thomas were hurt in the course of his new partnership with Peter. By the time Thomas was waking up in UCH with a hole in his lung, however, he was considering it plenty.

The first night passed in relative quiet, as Thomas was still too far under the influence of his drugs to think cogently; Abdul did his early-morning work with Peter, went home to rest, and then was back again by evening, and it was then, as he found himself slipping into a hazy doze next to Thomas’s bed, that it began.

Abdul breathed in, and his throat closed up from cold.

He was standing on the edge of a snow-covered field, surrounded on three sides by trees, their bare branches heavy with white powder. A pale red haze lingered above the woods, signaling the onset of sunset.

“Damn,” Abdul breathed, and his breath gusted out in front of him. He was wearing some sort of thick, half-woolen uniform, and a bag was over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see that they would keep him all that warm.

 _In for a penny, in for an Ettersburg pound_.

There was a slight snapping sound behind him, and he turned – and Nightingale stepped out from the tree cover, squinting into the dying light.

He was hurt, Abdul could tell immediately: his right hand was cemented to the ripped side of his dark green uniform coat, and the khaki sapper pants below them were splattered with mud and what had to be the blood of others. He was hatless and nearly colorless with cold and fatigue, and still looked more dangerous than Abdul could ever recall seeing him in his life.

All that rather paled into insignificance, however, compared to the Browning pistol he had in his left hand, leveled straight at Walid’s chest.

“Identify yourself,” Nightingale said – and then, when Abdul stared at him for a second too long without answering, his face hardened into frightening lines. “ _Identifizieren Sie sich_.”

Abdul filed away the hurt he felt at knowing that Thomas – even Thomas – was capable of blind hatred, and raised his hands cautiously at his sides. “I’m Scottish,” he said clearly, letting his accent turn broad.

“What regiment?”

Abdul thought rapidly, remembering home and the rusting naval stations around the bay and the old controlled minefield lurking beneath its waters, the Hurricanes which still roared skywards sometimes from RAF Oban, and, suddenly, the little exhibition in the local library full of black-and-white photographs of men long dead. “51st Highland Division. Attached to Anti-Tank Battery 204.”

The gun didn’t waver, but something in Thomas’s body certainly became less rigid, and the fingers of his other hand shifted on his side. “You’re a ways from home.”

“Firefight, a few miles back,” Abdul said, feeling and, he was sure, sounding foolish as he scrabbled for a lie. “We were overrun and I legged it into the woods.”

Nightingale looked him up and down, more carefully, and the barrel of the pistol wavered. “You’re an RAMC doctor, sergeant?”

Abdul, surprised, looked down at his shoulder. He could just see the worn patch beneath the stripes on the arm of his shirt: a crown atop a wreath, surrounding a coiling snake.

 _Alhamdulillah_ , he thought, a little of the knotted tension in his stomach suddenly releasing. _Deep down, he knows who I am_.

“Yes, sir,” he said, more confidently. “Trained at Edinburgh.”

“Well,” Nightingale said, a ghost of a smile on his pale face. “That’s a stroke of luck, I suppose. But you’ll have to do your work as we walk. We can’t stay here.”

Abdul didn’t have to ask – a sharp wind picked up, and Abdul shivered, and on the back of its gusts there was a long, drawn-out howling, taut and rising.

“Let me take a look,” he said briskly, and stepped forward, what he now realized was the medical bag bumping on the back of his right hip. Thomas looked surprised at his decisiveness, but lifted the pistol away from him nonetheless, and hissed slightly through his teeth when Abdul knelt down and carefully pulled his blood-crusted fingers away from his wound.

“You’ll live,” he decided, knowing it was true both from experience and from the fact that the trough the bullet had left in Thomas’s side had mostly congealed itself over with cold blood. “But you need to rest. There’s every chance of infection.”

“I’d love to hear your opinion on where to do so,” Nightingale said, with little mirth in his sarcasm. “I have to keep moving.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” Abdul said, not looking up as he pulled what turned out to be a rudimentary, rough roll of cloth bandage out of his bag; he’d have to investigate the rest of its contents later.

“Doctors,” Thomas said faintly above him, as he rolled the fabric around a slim waist, more muscled and yet lacking in health than Abdul was used to; the dual effects of war. “You’re all the same.”

“Indeed we are,” Abdul said, not knowing quite what he was agreeing to as he tied a rough knot in the bandages just below Thomas’s sternum and then let his rumpled shirt fall again as he stood. “All right, sir?”

Nightingale said nothing; he just turned to start trudging across the open field before them, sliding the pistol back into the holster on his thigh, his hands stuck into the armpits of his ruined coat.

“Shite,” Abdul said, with feeling, and followed.

He realized quickly that the dream was perfect. Not in its content, of course, but in its details – it felt as real as any raw, dim day he had ever experienced in the long winters of Scotland. There was birdsong, if infrequently, in the tops of the trees they meandered under; his ill-fitting boots filled with slush and soaked through to his frozen skin, and snow drifting down from the trees trickled as it melted down his back. In the distance, but from what direction he couldn’t quite tell, there was the muted thunder of what had to be mortar fire.

Thomas, he noticed after a few minutes, had no staff. He would have thought Nightingale would be lost without it, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. He was physically weak, it was clear to see – his footsteps slipped or his balance faltered often as they picked their careful way through the woods, but there was no fear in him, and no care, either – not much of anything left in his face, from what Abdul could see of him as he trailed slightly behind. But in the darkness under the canopy, knowing what he knew, Abdul would have trusted him with his life in a heartbeat.

Perhaps he would have to, he thought, as the howling drifted through the air behind them. It didn’t sound any closer, but he knew magic could be deceiving. “What are we running from – wolves?”

Nightingale laughed, a thin, breathy sound. “Of a sort.”

Abdul made a note to have a very serious conversation about werewolf lore when they both woke up, and kept walking – until, that is, Nightingale slipped and went down onto one knee, landing heavily on his hand, and the pained gasp he let slip was more than enough for Abdul to pull rank.

“Sir,” he said, and put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, firm and hoping he was warmer than Thomas’s clammy skin. “You will stop.”

“All right, damn you,” Thomas snapped, and settled awkwardly down into the wet hollow of a tree’s roots, his eyes diligently scanning the way they had come. “Have you got a light, sergeant?”

“No, sir,” Abdul said as he tugged at the hem of Thomas’s shirt again to see if the bandage had stayed put, both saddened and satisfied to have one question answered. “Sorry.”

Thomas grunted something wordless and slipped the little cigarette case he had half-pulled out of his shirt pocket back into its place. His breath came fast and shallowly as Abdul inspected his wound, and there was sweat beading on his forehead – all the telltale signs of infection were coming on, and Abdul had no qualms about sprinkling the dusty remains of what had been a packet of sulfa from the medical bag into the oozing scabs. It was almost a thrill, he thought for a moment, to be practicing what felt like a technique from centuries past – until he remembered whose body it was, exactly, under his care, and the gap he usually maintained so easily between doctor and patient evaporated, and he found his hands shaking as he retied the bandage.

“51st Highland,” Thomas mused, his half-open eyes looking at nothing over Abdul’s shoulder. “Whereabouts in the Highlands are you from?”

“Oban, sir.”

“Pretty country,” Nightingale sighed. His body was sinking into the hollow, all of his strength visibly leaving him, until he looked like nothing more than a limp rag. “And your name?”

It took Abdul’s mind a long moment to work through that, and all of the repercussions of what he could say, and when he did speak the old name felt foreign on his tongue. “Andrew Wilson, sir.”

The dream shifted; the tops of the trees seemed to bend inward, and the edges of the world seethed, as though sensing something alien. Thomas, Abdul realized, was suddenly alert again, and watching him very carefully.

“Andrew,” Thomas said slowly.

There was a touch of suspicious recognition in his eyes, and Abdul could do nothing but wait, breathless and still.

And then he was barreled sideways by something enormous, black, and reeking, and lost all of his breath entirely.

He let out a strangled yell, plunged the medical bag into the werewolf’s gaping mouth in lieu of it being able to get its teeth into his arm, and scrambled upright as the creature wrestled, yelping, with the canvas and its straps, coming to a staggering halt above Thomas where he lay in the tree roots. There were three of them, all huge and stinking, with small, cruelly intelligent eyes, crouched and snarling as they stalked towards him across the snow.

“Fuck me,” he blurted, and called over his shoulder, unwilling to take his wide eyes off the werewolves for a moment. “Thomas Nightingale,” he called, trying and mostly failing to keep his fear out of his voice, “it’s time to bloody well wake up.”

“Out of the way.”

“What are you – ”

“ _Out of the way,_ Abdul!”

Taking what little of his courage was left in his hands, Abdul stepped clumsily to one side and slipped, never turning his back on the wolves, and there stood Thomas, upright and blazing.

Three fireballs streaked towards the wolves before Abdul could blink. One took, and the werewolf shrieked and spun, its fur whisping and smoking away into nothing; the other two shook it off and kept coming, until Thomas started firing the Browning. There were flames everywhere, spilling out into twigs and branches and bushes, throwing off startling heat, and in the midst of it all the bullets flew, briskly, one after another after another, until the second werewolf collapsed in a shuddering, twitching pile a few yards from Abdul’s feet, and the third, thinking the better of attacking, turned tail and fled, limping heavily and leaving blood spattered in its wake.

Abdul stared, gasping, knowing he wouldn’t be sleeping easily again for a long time – if he ever woke up from this particular nightmare – and, in the dreadful silence that followed, barely got to his feet in time to catch Thomas as he slumped and fell.

He couldn’t tell how long he traveled for, after that. The night was long in winter and felt longer still, and passed slowly, as he walked with the gun warm on his hip and Thomas’s arm over his shoulder, sometimes helped by Thomas’s own stumbling feet, sometimes simply dragging dead weight. He sweated from the exertion and it froze into his clothes; he didn’t dare take off Thomas’s coat for fear he would freeze, but he knew the wound had started bleeding again, could feel it wet under his fingers.

At one point, Thomas stirred, and his head lolled into the crook of Abdul’s neck. “Wilson?” he whispered.

Abdul found enough breath to speak, and even the strength to smile. “You called me Abdul, earlier.”

“Did I?” Thomas said. Above them, the trees strained. “I’m sorry. Dashed odd mistake to make,” he added, sounding bemused, and then lapsed into quiet again.

Abdul, growing ever more uneasy about how and when the dream would end – or if it ever would – decided discretion would be the lesser part of valor. “What were you running from, back there?”

Nightingale’s steps faltered, and they had to slow down until he steadied himself. “Your men were overrun, you say?” he asked eventually.

“Yes.”

“Well, so were mine,” Thomas said shortly.

“And you got away.”

“I was left behind.” The way he said it was weary and unaccusatory, almost longing. “Are you a coward for running from your unit, Wilson?”

The question was unexpected, but Abdul had no problem answering it. “I reckon I am. Especially here.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Nightingale said. He was pale and cold to the touch, and Abdul didn’t like how transparent his eyes were, like he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. “A coward doesn’t stick his arm into a werewolf’s mouth. And a coward doesn’t help a stranger who is more than likely to die.”

There was silence for several minutes as they slid their way into and out of a large hollow in the forest floor. Above them, Abdul fancied he could see glimmers of dawn light starting to filter in from the grey sky above, and it was the hope that the trees ahead were thinning that let him speak.

“A man can be afraid of the woods and not be a coward,” he said simply. On his shoulder Thomas didn’t stir, but Abdul could tell he was listening. “And a man can lose everything, and keep on living.”

There was a soft shake of laughter in the chilled body pressed into his side. “If you believe that, sergeant,” Nightingale rasped, “then you are a better man than I.”

There was a clearing ahead, and in it, the sounds of voices, of machinery and men and even a few horses, and, though Abdul kept walking, and felt Nightingale’s feet becoming stronger beneath him, he bent his head to the side and pressed his face to Thomas’s temple.

“Wake up,” he whispered. “Wake to the world, Thomas Nightingale.”

_Wake up, and come back to me._

His spine bent backwards as he came out of the dream, and he sucked in a huge breath of positively hot air and coughed it back out again, his entire body tensed and shaking in the hospital chair; his vision was swimming, and his heart pounded in his ears as he stared at the ceiling of the ICU and struggled for calm.

“Abdul!”

There were thin, pale fingers clamped hard around his wrist, and he blinked downwards to see that Thomas had turned awkwardly on his side in his bed, his eyes wide with trepidation and the wires and tubes hooking him up to his machinery hopelessly tangled underneath him.

“You bloody idiot,” Thomas breathed, faint and weak. “You should have gotten out of there much sooner.”

Abdul wiped at his face and stood unsteadily over the bed, feeling his body start to warm to the tips of his fingers and toes as though he really was coming out of hypothermia. “It was just a dream – ”

“It’s _magic_ , Abdul,” Thomas insisted, his hand lifting from Abdul’s wrist to his face, his eyes searching him up and down for apparent signs of damage. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Abdul said firmly, and put a hand flat on Thomas’s collarbone. “I promise you. I’m perfectly all right.”

Thomas looked as though he would have liked to say more, but he was prevented by the nurse who came bustling in to Thomas’s curtained cubicle, having been drawn by the shrill beeping that was emitting from his heart monitor. Two of the ICU doctors on staff followed, and Abdul stepped out of their way into the corridor, drawing his coat more closely around him and blowing surreptitiously into his white-cold hands.

He needed to stay away, as guilty as it made him feel, for the next couple of hours. He retreated to his office, and prayed in the dark, and wondered what on earth it was he had been trying to do – and whether, he thought, sickeningly, as dawn approached in the real world, whether he had actually done harm.

As the clock on his computer ticked over to five o’clock in the morning, he slipped into an exhausted, fidgety sleep in his chair, and walked through canvas-walled wards, smelling death and disinfectant and mud.

Thomas was waiting for him, somewhere, he realized, and turned a corner in the murk to see Nightingale lying on a crooked cot, pale and still and with three days’ worth of messy scruff on his cheeks.

On the rudimentary nightstand between him and the patient in the next bed (a patient who no longer had a face, and despite all of his recent experience with that particular complaint there was something about it which made Walid flinch and turn away) was a mirror, and a bowl of water, and a little tub of shaving cream – and Abdul knew, suddenly, what he needed to do.

He woke again with a start, made himself an extremely strong cup of coffee, and went back down to the ICU just as it turned half-six. Thomas was resting quietly, looking drawn and tired, and like he very much didn’t want to open his eyes.

Abdul smelled canvas, and, deeply regretting how much the two scenes resembled each other, went off to find an electric razor.

Thomas stirred at the touch of Abdul’s fingers on his chin, and opened his eyes halfway as Abdul turned the razor onto its lowest setting and went to work, brushing stubble off onto the cloth a nurse had brought him. “Thank you.”

“As good a reminder of modernity as any, eh?” Abdul said, with a smile, and waggled the buzzing razor. “We’ll keep you looking as aristocratic as ever, never fear.” _No more waking dreams in your mirror_.

“I would have spared you that,” Thomas said, weary and serious, and Abdul switched the razor off to hear him better, knowing he would not be dissuaded. “I could not have borne it if it claimed you, as well. My past is no one else’s to bear.”

“On the contrary,” Abdul said immediately, not knowing if it would do any good, but needing very badly to say it. “If there was any way to have been there with you, I would do it. I would have it happen that way.”

“It didn’t,” Thomas said sadly, but he was looking up at Abdul nonetheless, no longer ashamed. “Don’t wish for it.”

Abdul nodded, and switched the razor back on. “I won’t,” he murmured, as he carefully turned Thomas’s head and neck. “But don’t expect me to leave you to it, either.”

“Fair enough,” Thomas smiled, and fell asleep without a sound under Abdul’s hands.

*

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this while listening to the soundtrack of _Dunkirk_ , which seemed spookily apt. Title comes from a poem written to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton by James Thomson. Thanks for reading!


End file.
